Paul Marie Ghislain Otlet (1868–1944) was a Belgian author, entrepreneur, visionary, lawyer and peace activist. He is one of the founders of information science, a field he called "documentation". Otlet created the Universal Decimal Classification, one of the most prominent examples of faceted classification.

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His major works are the Traité de Documentation, le livre sur le livre [Treatise on Documentation: the Book about the Book], published in 1934, and Monde [World], published in 1935. The former, synthesizing his decades of experience working in his various organizations and thinking about documentation, became not only a work of reference but perhaps one of the first comprehensive treatises on what was later to be known as information science. It discussed the nature and relationships of the various formats and media in which knowledge is conveyed. Among the many innovative ideas expressed in these books were what Otlet called livre irradié [the broadcast book] and the livre téléphoté [telephoto book]. He described what we would know as a scholar's work station (sometimes called by him Mondothèque) in which were incorporated a range of multimedia functionalities some of which have still not become routinely available in personal computers. He also wrote extensively about the need for a universal network for the communication of knowledge. His theoretical approach to the organization and dissemination of information was far ahead of its time, notably in foreshadowing the Internet, Hypertext, and the World Wide Web. (Source)

Charles van den Heuvel, "Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web in Research from a Historical Perspective: The Designs of Paul Otlet (1868-1944) for Telecommunication and Machine Readable Documentation to Organize Research and Society", Knowledge Organization 36:4 (2009), pp 214-226. [11](English)